Edgar Allan Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream: You are not wrong, who deem, That my days have been a dream

Analyzing Poe’s A Dream Within A Dream is an exercise in futility. Poe’s intentions can’t be known, but it doesn’t stop people from trying.

Read straightforward you get a sense that Poe is on the verge of loss, he’s kissing his loved one goodbye, and if there’s a sense that he’s accepted it, it’s because accepted the reality, or unreality of life. You can’t live a dream for long, because it’s simply a dream within the dream that is life.

In A Dream Within A Dream, everything slips away, like sand through the fingertips, you can’t hold onto anything, particularly something that is fluid. A dream within a dream is fluid by nature, for dreams aren’t bound by nature’s law. Instead they build upon the imagination, where there are no laws.

Life, like sand held in the fingertips beneath the waves is always being sucked into the deep, washed away by nature’s tides. Man has the ability to imagine anything he wants, and in the imagination those dreams can live. But in life, we are bound by nature’s laws, which deem in the end, all is lost.

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow —You are not wrong, who deemThat my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision, or in none,Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roarOf a surf-tormented shore,And I hold within my handGrains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creepThrough my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!O God! Can I not graspThem with a tighter clasp?O God! can I not saveOne from the pitiless wave?Is all that we see or seemBut a dream within a dream?

Who are we?

THE POETS WERE THE ROCK STARS OF THEIR AGE. It was a time when people actually recognized the value of the written line. But reading is hard, and poetry fell by the wayside, only to be resurrected in popular song.
Even that was short lived. Lyrics stopped having meaning. People still wrote intelligent lyrics, they just stopped being mainstream for the most part.
WHAT THOUGHTS REMAIN TO BE THOUGHT? What lines remain unwritten?
We're certainly not the first to set poetry to music. But we decided why not do the fuck out of it? You can hear every song for free whenever you want, either here on the site, through YouTube or Bandcamp. We don't do this for the money or to get laid. We do this because this is what we do. We make music.
It's not that we don't have anything to ... Read More about Highbrow lyrics tossed into a cauldron of acid rock and dark folk potions

Catch us …

The albums

phantasmagoria

On Witches, Fairies, Ghouls and Goblins

ON JUNE 16th, 1816, Lord Byron opened a book titled Phantasmagoriana, which he and his house guests took turns reading from. From that night came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, considered the first English vampire novel, and the precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Drawing from that idea, herein lies poems from Shakespeare, Yeats, Spenser, Kipling, Ben Johnson and others, set to music. Musical influences range from British folk and Irish traditional, to Black Sabbath, King Crimson and Jethro Tull.

From the fairies who ride wild in the moonlight, to the danse macabre, it’s a look back at a time when people weren’t so certain, weren’t so brave as to believe that what we see with our eyes is all there is. And told in the words of some of the greatest lyricists of their day.

echo

A Pagan Hymnal

Paganism is quite often a nature religion, following the natural cycle. The seasons that not only divide the year, but life as well. A suite of songs from the romantic poets, based on these quarters of the calendar, a bit of Wordsworth, a plethora of Rossetti, a brace of Shakespeare and others poets, romantic and otherwise.

exiles

Folk Tales of Heartache and Woe

A trip down the gutters of the folk tradition. Recorded in a haze of despair and expensive alcohol, fueled by heartbreak, some of the more obscure folk songs out there. And so we present a potpourri of songs and stories, from the tragic to the morbid, disturbingly funny to the heartfelt … all the human emotions tied up in a singly bizarre, folkish package.